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Thursday, January 26, 2012

Sorry passengers, we're doubling your flight time

As you read this, I'm on my flight to Melbourne - woohoo! I wrote the following post during my last trip to Sydney.... let's hope this experience is not repeated:

A flight from Sydney to Canberra is supposed to take around forty minutes. Even less if you are on one of the proper planes (as I thankfully was), instead of the Dash 8 with it's ancient looking propellors.

Thank the lord I was NOT on one of these.

After around forty minutes, the captain told the cabin staff to prepare for landing and nothing was amiss. Then it got a little bumpy, and an hour later we still hadn't landed. There was a storm front right over Canberra so we couldn't land, and instead our forty minute flight turned into a two and a half hour flight as we circled the capital.

As the plane lurched up and down and left and right for an hour and a half, the children on the flight screamed 'Weee' and 'Wooo' and had a fabulous time. It did feel a little like a rollercoaster. I sat there gripping the armrests and the story about the Qantas flight that plunged mid air kept running through my head.

Holes in the Qantas aircraft that suddenly plunged 700 feet with no warning - caused by people's heads. The cause of the incident? A "rare" computer mulfunction.

Thankfully I had a window seat, and the fluffiness of the clouds provided some distraction. I can totally see why our perception of heaven involves being in the clouds - there is something very magical and Godly about them. I took a few interesting photos:

Do you have a flight horror story? I hope you're all enjoying Australia day, I'll be posting about my day once I'm back in Canberra!